While in the midst of recording “C is for Cthulhu” we received an e-mail from the C.J. Boyd, Molly McDermott, and Daena Lower who had this really great idea of asking artists to contribute a cover of a Kate Bush song with the proceeds going to help in the struggle for reproductive rights.

Since we were just busy recording a super heavy song, it was a bit of a shift in gears but we were able to knock out a nice cover of Kate’s “Watching you without me” in a mere two weeks and despite the high stress in the process we all came out pretty happy with the results. I think our February 4th blog pretty much sums up the whole project…

“I’m sure Steve will be happy if I go on the record here and state that Steve (the most Rock and Roll member of the LP4) hates Kate Bush’s music. Others in the band may not care for her work but Steve really, really cannot stand it on every level – her voice, her composition, the recordings, you name it. I’m sure if I even gave him a tosser like “But dude she’s Kate Bush, CBE!” Steve would not even acknowledge that “Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire!” is a badass title to have.

So, how do you approach a cover if you are the only person in the band who is a fan? I mean, yes, of course, I knew if everyone voted to do it, Steve would put his grumbling aside and take to the task like a pro but that didn’t mean that I could discount his distaste entirely and walk on eggshells I did. I picked 4 songs which I felt could be adapted but eventually, with some help from Larry, chose “Watching You Without Me” from Hounds of Love because it would be the most wide-open of all the songs for adaptation. The final approach I took was to only have Larry and Mlee hear the original song and let Steve, Clinton, and Charlie wing it. Giving people only the barest of direction can be pretty annoying for musicians in a recording session but by doing this, not only would I not torture them with music they didn’t care for but more importantly they could approach it with a clean slate and not have any preconceptions of the track. It was just a lot of booze, here are two notes and “Larry, hit that beat!” Steve ended up inverting the bass line, Clinton channelled Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan,” and Charlie heard echoes of Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand.” I had a ton of reverb so I just kind of went all Will Sargent on my open-tuned guitar and the ever brilliant Mlee brought it all together. I thought her drunky drunk live scratch track was pretty awesome as they were but Mlee came in the week after and redubbed that track with all these layers of vocals to get that cool etherial vocal thing she does so well and just nailed it perfectly. Honestly, while the jam was pretty cool, without her vocals, the track just wouldn’t have held together as well as it does. In the end, everyone was pretty happy with the results and we were all pretty thrilled to be able to contribute.